The Twinkling of an Eye

What gets hidden under the sofa cushions is the Passing Show, a weekly family magazine. The contents might include a new way to cook a cake, how to make a perfect dovetail joint, an article on a celebrity such as Gordon Richards, the jockey, or Sir Malcolm Campbell, the world’s land speed record holder, readers’ letters, a short story, a cartoon strip and a serial. The serials include two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus stories.

These serials are illustrated by an artist called Fortunino Matania, whose individual style tends towards the female breast. For all I know, his real name is Joe Smith. The Italian name licenses him to give vent to tits at a time when they are still suppressed.

It is tits the visiting pastors cannot abide. So Passing Show goes under the sofa cushions.

Sometimes the pastors prove to have more whimsy than Wesley in them. Come Saturday evening, they have settled in, and sit companionably round the fire with the parents. The atmosphere becomes a little less stiff. The preacher ventures a joke. Perhaps he ventures to ask if Mrs Aldiss would be greatly offended if he smoked a pipe.

Why, no. Of course. Yes. Do. By all means. She will fetch him an ashtray.

And would he by any chance like a little something with his pipe?

Well …

Well, it happens we have some elderberry wine in the cupboard. Home-made, of course. Bill finds a little sip now and again is good for him.

Well. If you’re going to have one … I don’t mind if I do, Mrs Aldiss.

Please call me Dot.

The Lord has spoken against all alcoholic drink but, in His mercy, has made an exception for home-made elderberry wine. The berries come from the tree in the garden under which the Red Indians lurk.

All this delicacy, this hesitation, these taboos, may sound amusing to a later generation. No funnier than violence on the streets and hooliganism at sport and aggressive coarse language today is going to sound to the citizens of AD 2050. Nothing is really funny about the life of past generations: they had their problems and their pleasures, as we do today. It is simply that the problems in small particulars are different.

The caution not to offend, the delicacy over drink, the hospitality my parents offered (under whatever social pressure), the prurience over the innocuous Radio Times, even the dedication of these men who came and preached week after week – all that was how it was in 1930 in East Dereham. Yes, I am amused now; but that is my entitlement because I lived through it. And through it all runs something tender, a sort of unguarded wish to be better, kinder, decent, God-fearing – virtue as well as hypocrisy.

Poor Bill and Dot, how greatly they care, how greatly they are bound to the mores of time and place, as we all continue to be. For the Zeitgeist largely glides snake-like through our mortal lives, sloughing a skin now and again. And how greatly one of them at least rejoices when it befalls that they are exiled from this small town where the mores are particularly exacting.

But that crisis lies on the far side of the Five Year Abyss.

The Passing Show, with its pleasing title, lies on the far side of another gulf, the World War II Abyss. Its day is done. There is no family magazine like it now. But then, the family itself has disintegrated, if you are to believe the higher journalism.

How much brighter magazines are today. How they proliferate. How they specialise. Six on yachting. Seventeen or eighteen on cars. Twenty, thirty, on cooking and dieting. Fifty or more on PCs. On the upper shelves, rows of tit, bum and cunt magazines. No family magazine. Don’t laugh at the thirties, okay? Among major gains, something has been lost.

Little conformist that I am, I do not mind the itinerant pastors, since my parents seem to like them. I come greatly to like Edna V. Rowlingson. I recognise in this bright, sparrow-like lady a real goodness; of course, at the time I do not phrase it in these terms. I know only that it is pleasurable to be with her. Although I am only one of her flock, she likes me. She cares about people. For this reason, she makes a splendid preacher. Perhaps if you really know her, you will find she is truly concerned to think we shall all go to hell. I am sorry when Bill jokes about her behind her back.

William Cowper is part of the mythology. The ugly little church that bears his name is built on the site of the old house in which he died. There is much in that very English poet to love – not only his poems but his letters, which display a gentle personality.

Cowper believed in eternal damnation, as I did. This is one way in which the national mentality has changed over the course of a generation. We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result.

The film continues, an 8mm epic. Year by year, I begin to discover more of East Dereham. At the far end of the market place is the Cabin. It stands behind the newly built war memorial. You climb a stair to it, hence its name. Inside, Dot and her son eat iced cakes. A few doors away, conveniently, is Mr Toomey, the dentist, who profits from the sale of the iced cakes. I am rewarded with lead soldiers whenever I visit Mr Toomey and do not make a fuss. I never fuss.

The reason why we all keep Mr Toomey in business is because of a habit of Bill and Dot’s. By their bedside stands a tin of Callard & Bowser’s Olde Mint Humbugs. At bedtime, they pop these corrosives into their mouths and their son’s mouth. By the time the son is twelve, both parents have to wear false teeth.

Just beyond Mr Toomey’s torture chamber is the entrance to the cattle market, past the Cherry Tree pub. On Fridays, this market fills with life. To me and my cousins, it seems to sprawl for miles. Some animals arrive by lorry, others by horse-drawn carts. Many are treated with cruelty, made to hurry, to be herded into metal pens. They slip, try to escape, are heartily beaten. Cows, bulls, sheep, ewes, a few goats, some with kid. All are kicked and cursed into appropriate pens. Blood, excrement, straw, fly everywhere.

Into small cages are crammed many kinds of living thing. Ducks, geese, hens, cockerels, several types of rabbit, stoats, ferrets, their cages marked with a warning not to touch. The ferrets fling themselves in a fury at their bars.

Perhaps rural life is always like that. Respect for animal life is not high.

My grandfather, The Guv’ner, is a JP in the time I know him. I like to go and play in the grounds of Whitehall, where my grandmother lies upstairs in bed. Whitehall looks vaguely Italianate. Wide eaves and a tower, sitting in the middle of the building, account for that. Its windows are large, their sills on the lower floor coming to within a foot of the ground. An ornate verandah runs along the front of the house. The place has a peaceful and generous air as it sits foursquare at the end of its long drive.

The gardens run a good way back, past the asparagus beds, the vegetable beds, the two sunken greenhouses, each of which is patrolled by age-old toads, the fruit trees, to a wide lawn fringed by sheltering trees and shrubs. Spinks is H. H.’s loyal gardener, and Spinks’s loyal companion is H. H.’s dog, Spot. Spot is a wire-haired terrier. Three enormous black cats live at Whitehall. H. H. spoils them and talks to them, lowering his habitual guard.

H. H. bought Whitehall before the First World War in his cool offhand manner.

He is travelling back by train from London on one of his buying trips when he falls into conversation with another passenger. This passenger says he is leaving Dereham to live elsewhere and intends to sell his house. The Guv’ner says he happens to be looking for a suitable house.

The passenger says his house is fairly large, with good gardens and a field, the recreation ground, attached.

The Guv’ner knows the house.

By the time the two men reach Dereham station they have shaken on it.

Grandma Aldiss, the farmer’s daughter, once Lizzie Harper, is bedridden for as long as I am about. Dot knew her when she was well, and cherishes some of her recipes. One favourite recipe is for Pork Mould, a dish made with pigs’ trotters. When cold, it is turned out of a mould rather resembling a child’s sand castle. We eat it with Colman’s mustard, and plain brown bread on the side.

I do not recall Bill ever going to Whitehall to see his mother. Dot often goes, and takes me with her. Dot will carry fruit or cornflour buns in her basket. She will be in her cheery mode.

We proceed upstairs to a room at the rear of Whitehall. Here long windows on two walls look down the length of the garden and across to The Rec, as the adjoining field is known. Lizzie lies patiently in bed, year after year. Self-effacing in the background, a nurse attends her, wearing a starched cap, uniform, and black cotton stockings.

Provided I do not make a noise, I am allowed a grape or two from the fruit dish by the side of the invalid’s bed.

Why do I remember the room so well, with its long curtains with wooden rings on mahogany rods, and a wash stand with basin and jug on it, and the swan-neck brass light fitting over the bedside table, and the grey patterned carpet, and the general grey stuffiness of the room – and yet cannot call to mind a single feature of Lizzie, or anything she said? Or anything Bill ever said about her?

What has gone wrong? Two of her four children died. Is there some great disappointment in her life? She leaves no record. As far as I know, she makes no complaint. She dies in 1930 or 1931. I fail to remember the event.

Every Christmas, we go up to Whitehall for Christmas dinner. It is a serious commitment. Beforehand, Bill and Dot become anxious. Also present will be the rival brother’s family. Gordon with his sharp-nosed Dorothy and their three children will outnumber us. I, by contrast, skip about, because I shall receive a present from The Guv’ner, and it might be a Hornby train. He always knows what young boys like.

Despite a roaring fire, the dining room at Whitehall is cold. There is no central heating. Dot always complains beforehand, applying Snowfire and cachous to their appropriate stations. I know without being told that she fears Dorothy’s sharp nose, which bores holes in Dot’s fragile self-confidence. I know without being told of the rivalry between Bill and Gordon. H. H. ignores these tensions.

In the room above the dining room lies Lizzie. She is not brought down, perhaps cannot be brought down, to join the fray.

We are seated, nine of us, round the table. The maid brings in the turkey. And I disgrace the family.

This humiliating memory must date from Christmas 1927, when I am twenty-eight months old. If it dates from the next year, then it proves I am a backward child. For a christening present, the Roddicks, family friends, give me a silver pusher. I adore the pusher. It is a miniature hand-held bulldozer. The pusher has a loop for a finger to go through and a tiny shovel blade. With this, food is pushed towards a spoon held in the other hand. It is a device to simplify eating for the infantile or retarded. This I employ on The Guv’ner’s turkey, which in consequence has to be cut up for me.

One of Dot’s great triumphs is to have delivered me into the world ten days before my cousin Tony is born. This, it is felt, is definitely one up on Dorothy.

But – here is Young Hopeful on one side of the table, still having his food cut up, still using this babyish implement. It is a gift to the opposing team. On the other side of the table, his cousin is already using a knife and fork, although not wisely or too well.

The contrast is immediately noted.

Oh, Brian still has his food cut up, does he, Dot?

Sometimes, yes, Dorothy. It’s quicker, really.

You don’t find the turkey at all tough, do you?

It’s very tender. How is yours?

He’s quite good with his little pusher. Tony has been using his knife and fork for some months now, haven’t you, dear?

Yes, Mummy. Smarmy merriment.

It is a bad moment. More than a moment. I am out of favour for several days.

The contrast between H. H.’s two surviving sons is marked. Gordon is large, hearty, almost bald. He looks out at the world through owlish spectacles. The cashier, Miss Dorothy Royou, long after she has taken up another occupation and another name, tells me how Gordon persuades her on a drive into the country in his car and tries to seduce her. She refuses. He kicks her out of the jalopy and she has to walk home. Other young ladies in the shop, she informs me, suffered from the same tactics.

Gordon also keeps in touch with events at Newmarket and frequently absents himself from the shop to go down and watch the horse races. On Saturday, he takes his boys over to Norwich to watch Norwich City play. He is a sporting man, and can be found pretty often in The King’s Arms in the market place.

Bill is of different build and habit. He is neat and spare, humorous, good-looking, less tall than his brother. He never in his life goes into a public house, and is teetotal for most of his years. He works hard in the shop and does not molest the ladies – or so the historic record asserts. He does not bet. Only once do we go to Newmarket with Gordon. Once a year, Bill and Dot will put a pound on the Irish sweepstake. God goes easy on the Irish sweepstake, perhaps because the Irish are so Catholic.

Bill does everything his father asks of him, is submissive, dutiful. Whereas Gordon has been known to cheek The Guv’ner and please himself.

On a wall in our long corridor, next to the photograph of Bill in a pierrot outfit, hangs a photo of Gordon and Bill as boys. They sit companionably on a rug together, with two terriers standing by. They wear caps and have guns tucked under their arms. Once they were friends. The photograph must cause Bill pangs of regret.

The traitorous thing is this, that I quite like Gordon and Dorothy. I occasionally go round to the Corner House where they live, where Dot never sets foot. They appear much richer than we are. Their house is better furnished. It is a puzzle. Also Dorothy has a huge folding tray table with raised edges, made especially for jigsaws; we work together amicably on a huge landscape which includes huntsmen. I labour under the impression that Dorothy is nice to me. I like my cousin Derek. And Gordon is generally genial if overbearing.

Tony and I kick a football about in their garden. He sends it through a window and bursts into tears. So I am one up on him. I would not cry.

Dorothy tells me a joke I am supposed to riddle out: ‘The Queen reigns over China’. I know she does not reign over China, but eventually we tease out the word-play. She rains every night, into her china chamber pot.

We are all convulsed with laughter. Fancy thinking that of haughty Queen Mary! The mere idea of Queen Mary peeing sends us into fits.

I go home and tell the joke to Dot. She is far from laughter. It is disgusting and vulgar, not a joke at all. Like an earlier queen, Dot is not amused.

My picture of Dereham, which we leave finally when I am twelve years old, is coloured by the attitudes of my parents. Only later do I realise Bill’s dependence on his father: he was my hero, and I thought he depended on no one. I perceive his dislike of Gordon, his brother, I soon realise how Dot suffers from paranoia.

She loves to accuse everyone of backbiting, while indulging in it herself. She is sweet to everyone’s face, cruel when they have gone. She is nervous. She consults Dr Duygan, whose advice to drink a whisky-and-soda after lunch every day has not entirely resolved her unhappiness. She suffers from being overweight, so that we visit Yarmouth to buy Dr Scholl’s shoes. Her largely unarticulated view of Dereham is that it is a kind of prison. Narrow-minded, she calls it.

She takes books from both Webster’s, the bookseller, and from Starling’s Lending Library. Starling’s books come in a protective cardboard jacket on which is printed a legend: ‘A Home without Books is like a House without Windows’. Dot often reads the legend aloud to me. ‘How true!’ she exclaims. Or perhaps more mysteriously she will say, ‘Too true, O King!’, quoting I know not what.

Gorleston on Sea figures large in our lives. From Dereham to Gorleston is about thirty-five miles. Gorleston is beautiful, a small, elegant seaside resort, with a bandstand and a pierrot show in summer. While I like everyone in the pierrot show, my favourite is the comedian (‘I’m the one who makes you go ha-ha,’ he sings as he comes on). Later we shall live in Gorleston for a while, as reported, until war breaks out, and the world we know falls into little bits, and the jolly rude picture postcards blow away down yesterday’s beaches.

Before the Five Year Abyss opens at my feet, Dot escorts me every September to the Dereham fair. On one occasion, I escape from Dot and rush to see a sideshow where a man stands bare-chested, swallowing watches offered by his audience. He gets hold of a turnip watch on a gold chain. He tips back his head and gulps it in, lowering it into his insides link by link, as if sinking an anchor into the North Sea.

He beckons me out of the crowd. Horrified, I go forward. I am forced to place my ear against his chest to give a sounding. I hear the watch ticking, entangled somewhere among the sea wrack of his lungs.

The watch is hauled up again, glittering with phlegm.

Another time, Dot plays the Wheel of Fortune, to win a yellow Norwich canary in a cage. She bears it home in triumph.

The bird becomes a favourite and ‘sings its heart out’. Considering how it is imprisoned and can never fly again, the phrase seems appropriate. It (or she, rather) lays many eggs, which Bill blows, to keep the shells bedded on cotton wool in a tobacco tin. Both Bill and Dot are baffled by this sequence of eggs.

One day, Bill gets up to riddle yesterday’s cinders and lay a fire in the grate, when he discovers the canary supine at the bottom of the cage, claws in the air. Alarmed, he takes it out and administers brandy to it on the tip of one of its feathers. The bird makes a full recovery, and continues to chirrup its song for many a year.

Bill, incidentally, is an expert on birds and birdsong. I stand with him, mute, on the edge of a great field. He waits under a tree, gun at the ready, for something for the pot, a rabbit or a pheasant. He wears plus fours and a cap at a rakish angle. I wear a tammy and rubber boots. A strange creaking note is heard distantly.

‘That’s a corncrake,’ he tells me. It seems a curious name for a bird. Nowadays, I fancy, modern methods of farming mean that the song of the corncrake is no longer heard over Norfolk farmland.

The fair comes to East Dereham with the ripe apples of harvest time.

While we in the Congregational church are lustily singing that ‘All be safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin’, the fair people are gathering in on the outskirts of town, waiting to invade. Tony and I mingle with the gypsies, their dogs and horses – and probably Alfred Munnings RA. The large caravans, the big rides, the big roundabouts are pulled by traction engines. The engines whistle and scream as the lofty monarchs are stoked into life.

Here the film is unreliable. Clever editing suggests that every year I run in to town beside the turning wheels of one of these machines, along with other urchins. I do so at least once. The hint of perpetuity remains, so great is the delight.

The ground shakes as our traction engine rolls towards the market place. A savage man with a red kerchief round his throat shovels in coal, standing high above us, a god with a black face. The great painted wheels turn, the twisted brass barley-sugar sticks that support the roof gleam, the furnace looks like the entrance to hell, while the smoke tastes like a whiff of paradise. We run yelling beside it, drinking in its power, all the way to the market square.

At the far end of the square, the Dodgems rink goes up rapidly. Once, with my friend Buckie, I discover a half-crown in a car recently vacated. We rejoice in our luck.

A visual treat is erected at the H. H. Aldiss end of the market place. The big roundabout is built round the traction engine that powers it. Under the striped canvas roof, a parade of monstrous bright animals, cockerels, tigers, spirited white horses and dragons, dances round and round, up and down, barely restrained from breaking out into the crowd and freedom.

How the staff of H. H love the fair! During their lunch hour, their one brief taste of liberty during the day, the young ladies of the drapery department, like a flock of blackbirds in their dark dresses, fly towards the attractions, sweeping me up with them as they go.

There’s my flirtatious millinery lady, all tease and flame! She shows her legs as we climb aboard the roundabout. Already the music starts, the platform begins to glide! I am lifted high by her, by her giggling friends, up, up on to the most Chinese of dragons. It seats three people. It begins to move. Up, down, up, down. The young ladies clutch me. I smell their perfumes. We all shriek. The music plays. The day shines and blurs.

Ah, the music of the big roundabout! The wheezing lungs of the boiler blow breath through unfolding punched paper, creating a din as powerful as the music. They play ‘Destiny’, ‘The Sun Has Got Its Hat On’, ‘You Can’t Stop Me from Dreaming’, ‘The Skater’s Waltz’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and many more tunes.

At night I am put to bed. Dot kisses me goodnight. The fair is still going. It’s getting rough, now that dusk closes in. Drunks are about. Who knows what’s happening as crowds are drawn to the excitement from distant Toftwood, Shipdham and Swanton Morley – chaps with girls and whatever they do together. As I fade away into sleep I hear its music in the distance: ‘You Are My Lucky Star’, interpreted through that randy, wheezing music.

When I am older, I have a small sister to take to the fair. She loves it as much as I do.

The fair people come into the Aldiss shop, often dragging their curs with them at the end of a piece of rope. The men buy new suits, spending generously in heaps of small coin. By the time the fair is over, its stalls folded away, its glitter packed and gone, the rubbish and droppings swept from the market square and Church Street, the town is fairly hopping with fleas.

Dot stands my sister and me in the bath. She pulls off our clothes. She searches every inch of us for fleas and squashes them with a thumbnail, one by one.

6

The Parents

My father told me … that mine was the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life, which he had found by long Experience was the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness.

Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe

The film continues, in that eternal present of memory.

Dot at this period of her life is a moody person. She is in her early thirties when I am born. She has yet to recover from the death of her daughter in 1920, confronting her naughty son with the perfections of the dead girl, with the result that this phantom little person preys heavily on his state of mind. Studying an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – a copy of which no serious household was without – I see a picture of a man pestered by a small angel fluttering round his shoulders: there is absurdity and menace in it. From then on, the dead sister becomes ‘the steel-engraving angel’.

Dot has other problems. Bill’s health is one; his difficulties stem from the war.

He enlists in the Army on the outbreak of war in 1914, aged twenty-four. In May of 1916, he is transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the RAF). His number is 26047.